Thanks for the replies on how to deal with bad blocks on reiserfs; for the
meantime, I managed to solve my problem (unable to use dpkg as several files
in /var/lib/dpkg/lists were corrupt and unmoveable) by simply renaming the
"lists" folder "lists-BADBLOCKS", creating a new lists folder, copying
everything over from the old folder, and replacing the ones I couldn't access
with those from a similarly configured machine. Worked.
Now to back up, and hope the drive doesn't die tooo soon.
Bruce